Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?
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@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
In these days in a SMB, what's the difference between an System Admin and a IT Director? Because its hard for me to believe that a System Admin or whatever random title you were giving would making a $200K and up.
There's a big difference. an IT director Manages people, specifically, a Director manages managers and/or supervisors. The CIO is at the top of the chain(an executive), they do very little day to day managing of people, usually go to the board and shareholder meetings set policies etc. an Admin is working on the systems/network.
If an SMB is using those titles interchangeably they are using the titles wrong.
In an SMB, one typically wears many hats.
I personally dropped IT Director (what my boss calls me) to IT admin. While I advise what to buy, I haven't been the one making the decisions, though I suppose my opinion does weigh heavily...
So lets say that's there is only two IT in the company. An System Admin and IT Director. The IT Director quits. Are you still an System Admin? Will you be getting paid more?
They aren't an IT director, maybe that's what they are calling them but it's an IT manager or IT Supervisor if all they have under them is a Systems Administrator.
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@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
In these days in a SMB, what's the difference between an System Admin and a IT Director? Because its hard for me to believe that a System Admin or whatever random title you were giving would making a $200K and up.
There's a big difference. an IT director Manages people, specifically, a Director manages managers and/or supervisors. The CIO is at the top of the chain(an executive), they do very little day to day managing of people, usually go to the board and shareholder meetings set policies etc. an Admin is working on the systems/network.
If an SMB is using those titles interchangeably they are using the titles wrong.
In an SMB, one typically wears many hats.
I personally dropped IT Director (what my boss calls me) to IT admin. While I advise what to buy, I haven't been the one making the decisions, though I suppose my opinion does weigh heavily...
So lets say that's there is only two IT in the company. An System Admin and IT Director. The IT Director quits. Are you still an System Admin? Will you be getting paid more?
Even at that level, calling the higher level one a Director is a joke. Unless he is actually directing IT decisions in the company, in that case he's likely the CIO/Director and also likely still hands on IT as needed (like the other guy is on vacation, or more).
So back to your question - is the company planning to replace the guy who left? if not, then as the person who stayed, I'd be demanding more money because I'm assuming my workload just doubled, and as the non decision maker, my role likely just changed as well - to decision maker.
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@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
In these days in a SMB, what's the difference between an System Admin and a IT Director? Because its hard for me to believe that a System Admin or whatever random title you were giving would making a $200K and up.
There's a big difference. an IT director Manages people, specifically, a Director manages managers and/or supervisors. The CIO is at the top of the chain(an executive), they do very little day to day managing of people, usually go to the board and shareholder meetings set policies etc. an Admin is working on the systems/network.
If an SMB is using those titles interchangeably they are using the titles wrong.
In an SMB, one typically wears many hats.
I personally dropped IT Director (what my boss calls me) to IT admin. While I advise what to buy, I haven't been the one making the decisions, though I suppose my opinion does weigh heavily...
Who makes the decision on what to buy really doesn't have anything to do with titles. normally it's not a director making those kinds of decisions, an IT director is more involved with the business side of things and making sure their teams have plans to meet those needs and come up with solutions to business problems.
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@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
CIO isn't a Systems Admin or Engineer. CIO is just a policy maker. Ours Makes way more than $500k as does any of our executive leadership.
GD?
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@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@black3dynamite said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
In these days in a SMB, what's the difference between an System Admin and a IT Director? Because its hard for me to believe that a System Admin or whatever random title you were giving would making a $200K and up.
There's a big difference. an IT director Manages people, specifically, a Director manages managers and/or supervisors. The CIO is at the top of the chain(an executive), they do very little day to day managing of people, usually go to the board and shareholder meetings set policies etc. an Admin is working on the systems/network.
If an SMB is using those titles interchangeably they are using the titles wrong.
In an SMB, one typically wears many hats.
I personally dropped IT Director (what my boss calls me) to IT admin. While I advise what to buy, I haven't been the one making the decisions, though I suppose my opinion does weigh heavily...
Who makes the decision on what to buy really doesn't have anything to do with titles. normally it's not a director making those kinds of decisions, an IT director is more involved with the business side of things and making sure their teams have plans to meet those needs and come up with solutions to business problems.
Sure, in a company of 1000 people, or a super top heavy smaller one.
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@Pete-S said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
I know it's a millennial thing to be inefficient and out of touch intentionally. but outside of "failure culture" it's always been ubiquitous.
Funny and sad but true!
Could it be some kind of student mindset that keeps lingering in their brains, even 10 years after they left school?
There does seem to be the "perpetual student", and not in a good way, that seems to happen in millennial culture. Not the "continuous learner" that we hope that people will be, but the lazy bohemian that goes contrary to business just because it is felt to be "cool" to do things without actually thinking them through or understanding them to fit in with the crowd.
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@Sam-I-Am said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
Typically we see engineers cap out around $225K. But admins head closer to $500K.
I am making much less then that as an engineer. You have opened my eyes. Do you have some links you could share of jobs in that salary range?
The highest paying sector of the IT world has always been in finance - because IT drives that market more than any other (IT starts to bleed into operations.) And what they do is magnified because of the banking industry - so a $50bn bank and a $50bn social media company each having a one minute outage or a data loss incident, the bank is hit 100x worse at the same scale as a Facebook or Google would be. So IT is dramatically more valuable in every vector - security, performance, uptime, reliability, accuracy, data loss, etc.
Of finance, it's investment banking that by far makes the most. So that's the famous "Wall St" and "Canary Wharf" firms (e.g. CitiGroup, not CitiBank.) If consumers know the name, it's probably not an investment bank.
Of investment banking, the top paid is usually hedge funds because they have the least regulation and so are free to hire the best without caps.
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@EddieJennings said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
I don't work for a tech giant, but I'm hoping where I am now will be more willing to allow work from home, especially since it's clear other than resolving hardware issues, people on my team have been 100% work from home since mid-March and work is getting done.
Tech giants tend to be in like the 90-95th percentile for pay. High, for sure, but the gap between the 95th percentile and the top is a big one. And in a market with hundreds of thousands of people, the top 5% is still a lot of people.
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@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@EddieJennings said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Sam-I-Am said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
Typically we see engineers cap out around $225K. But admins head closer to $500K.
I am making much less then that as an engineer. You have opened my eyes. Do you have some links you could share of jobs in that salary range?
Yeah. I'm only about $435K away from max as an administrator
yeah, these crazy numbers Scott loves to show, super rare positions - rare doesn't meant there aren't still hundreds, or even thousands of them at that range, but compared to the millions of IT jobs, they are still super rare.
Yes, for sure. But it's important to understand that this is true in any field. When we ask what the top positions are, obviously we should exclude statistical outliers (somewhere someone might earn $1m as an admin, but it's likely because he knows someone and its a favour or something, there is no career path to get there), but in every field... teacher, automotive designer, architect, accountant, automotive mechanic, etc. we should study things like "entry point" levels, mean averages, median averages, and top end pay and, if possible, build the curve to understand where people fall.
When we talk about $450K as an admin, we are absolutely at the "what's the top end pay for a category of people in this specific job", but still one that has a clear career path that anyone who puts in the time and effort could aspire to follow. It's still hard, really hard, but you don't have to "get lucky", it's part of the ladder.
One big problem we tend to have in IT, and I'll guess other fields do too but I don't know, is we tend to ignore the entire scope of high end jobs and think only of mid-level and refer to "top end" as the upper-ish end of the middle ranges. This is very, very misleading. I remember on Spiceworks one time people claimed that the "highest possible salary for IT" was literally under half of the starting salary for two years of experience, no college degree newbies getting junior positions at a bank.
And that's before we address things like false titles. In theory, saying that this is the top end salaries should instantly tell us that it's a small percentage, under 5%, who can hit those numbers. Probably under 1% to break the $300K barrier. But that's always how the "best" will work in a skilled field. Likewise, somewhere, there is someone making minimum wage.
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@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@EddieJennings said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Sam-I-Am said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
Typically we see engineers cap out around $225K. But admins head closer to $500K.
I am making much less then that as an engineer. You have opened my eyes. Do you have some links you could share of jobs in that salary range?
Yeah. I'm only about $435K away from max as an administrator
yeah, these crazy numbers Scott loves to show, super rare positions - rare doesn't meant there aren't still hundreds, or even thousands of them at that range, but compared to the millions of IT jobs, they are still super rare.
You can pretty much set your own Pay right now in IT, the problem is you won't find those jobs in SMBs and a lot of people will not jump away from SMBs even though SMBs don't usually value IT the jobs (along with the fact they tend to underpay in general) tend to be much easier and less complex. You get to Large Enterprises and there is a lot more work & more stress.
I'd word it a little differently. Not that SMBs don't appreciate or value IT (many don't, obviously, but plenty do), but it's moreso that they can't leverage that value.
I'll use myself as an example - I've got some killer high end Linux kernel tuning skills for low latency computing. Do you know how many SMBs have any way to leverage that skill? Zero. It's just not a useful skill in that market. So my value to an enterprise that needs that, compared to my value to an SMB, is different. IT is a skill set that "levers", it is magnified by the size and capability of the organization. So in a mom and pop, my maximum value to the company might be $30K. But my maximum value to an investment bank is easily in the billions.
It's like the bathroom problem. To an SMB, your ability to avoid needing to pee before fixing an outage might be worth $5 to the company. To an investment bank, the need to pee before fixing an outage can be a different of hundreds of thousands of dollars per outage. That one, very non-technical skill, can make all the financial difference in the world and no one thinks about it.
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@VoIP_n00b said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@EddieJennings said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Sam-I-Am said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
Typically we see engineers cap out around $225K. But admins head closer to $500K.
I am making much less then that as an engineer. You have opened my eyes. Do you have some links you could share of jobs in that salary range?
Yeah. I'm only about $435K away from max as an administrator
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Systems_Administrator/Salary
https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Systems_Engineer/SalaryKeep in mind those are by title, not be job, so measure nothing at all as SMBs use those titles randomly and represent the vast majority of the market.
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@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
The entire investment banking sector worldwide. I was once, ten years ago, turned down for a $350K job in Europe that I really, really wanted because I was "too senior, and they were confident that I'd move on quickly for more money." Little did they know that it was the village and residency that I wanted and I would have never left the company had they treated me well at that salary. We wanted to raise our kids there and were happy with the more junior admin role to do it (and hoped that they'd let me move to the senior position over time but keep the location.)
Even at lower paying places like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, these jobs exist, they are just the high end ones at those places that don't disclose their rates. But I've been approached at big numbers like this by some of those. Even non-profits can get into the $200K range.
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@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
I agree that $250K is around the cap for the "mass market" which includes most of the big west coast firms. The west coast's lack of overall efficiency means that salaries can't be at the level of the east coast. For the truly top end pay you almost always have to be involved in the low commute time, long hours, high efficiency NYC metro or similar.
I don't think supercomputing gets the high pay, though. Top end pay typically, in my experience, comes not from technical know how but from ability to maintain that technical capability under extreme pressure, at high speed, while handling the most complicated and critical business decision making.
Example - you get seconds, with no one to peer review you, to decide on how to proceed to deal with an offline, failure, or compromised system that, if it fails, could be impacting you at millions a minute, or human lives at stake.
Lots of $80K people could fix the problem. But most under $200K will start to stress out and collapse under the pressure.
I've literally seen a $65K library system admin have to be hospitalized due to the stress of an outage at a LIBRARY!
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@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
I don't know though, the way it's been explained, it just seems like a glorified helpdesk role in a way. But I guess for the money, why not.
Admins are the top end of helpdesk. Just business helpdesk, not end user. And obviously, that's where the top end of the market is. The only thing that can be more valuable to a business is by leaving the hands on tech and going into the business side of things more. You can stay technical, but a CIO is 90% business and 10% tech, whereas a top admin is more like 60/40.
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@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Pete-S said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
I know it's a millennial thing to be inefficient and out of touch intentionally. but outside of "failure culture" it's always been ubiquitous.
Funny and sad but true!
Could it be some kind of student mindset that keeps lingering in their brains, even 10 years after they left school?
There does seem to be the "perpetual student", and not in a good way, that seems to happen in millennial culture. Not the "continuous learner" that we hope that people will be, but the lazy bohemian that goes contrary to business just because it is felt to be "cool" to do things without actually thinking them through or understanding them to fit in with the crowd.
I don't see this as a millennial thing at all - in fact I'd say it's so much more the norm than not. Just the crowd each generation is going with is different.
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@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
Scott was the CIO or a step or so below or to the side of that making that much or more on wallstreet. So sure, it's possible, but again, just super rare.
These are true facts, but this mixes things together in a misleadingly suggestive way. I was a CIO or similar on Wall Street. But that only explains why I have such broad insight into what different roles get there. I was also a true admin and engineer there.
CIOs make way, way more than this up there. You word this in such a way to make it sound like you believe that it was me not being an admin, but rather a CIO, and to explain my salary that way. But that's wrong. And we aren't talking about me, but jobs in general. All of your implications here are completely wrong.
My CIO offer was in the millions, not the hundreds of thousands. And I hired admins, lots of them, at this prices. Real admins. And I worked as an admin and I'm using the admin salary, not some other salary, when I talk about admins. And I still, to this day, am used as a salary advisor for hedge funds who call me and I help to set their hiring prices. So I think you tend to mislead in how you present this. I'm part of the hiring manager teams, still today, who determine these salaries. So when I say $450K is what we intend to hire at as a mid-point for a position category, I mean it.
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@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
I think a huge part of this pay is also where you live.
Some company is now looking to allow their employees to WFH, from almost anywhere, but they are going to crush your pay based upon where you choose to live. We talked about it here a few days ago.
It's easy to say that, but it's not all that true. Flexibility is bigger, but location is not. In many cases, they might not know where you live. When you get to those really high end salaries, you are almost exclusively remote anyway. Your salary is impacted by your work visa and rights status, where the company is that you work for and other factors. And your flexibility overall. But you can make top end salaries all over the world, including WFH. Certainly being willing to move ups your options considerably. Nothing stops a career more than picking a really key factor and refusing to budget on it, like location.
Markets that will pay around the top end include: Germany, Switzerland, Austria, UK, US, Canada, Singapore, Japan, China, Hong Kong, etc. Not everywhere, by any stretch, but those are just the bases from which people work. WFH exists for people everywhere.
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@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
Scott was the CIO or a step or so below or to the side of that making that much or more on wallstreet. So sure, it's possible, but again, just super rare.
CIO isn't a Systems Admin or Engineer. CIO is just a policy maker. Ours Makes way more than $500k as does any of our executive leadership.
Exactly, he's mixing things. Scott HAS BEEN a system admin. And Scott HAS BEEN a CIO. And Scott HAS BEEN a Burger King manager.
He likes to mix when I say what I made as an admin and randomly associate that with my high school jobs or my terminal career jobs or whatever as if they are somehow associated with each other and influence each other, which they do not.
CIOs in Investment Banking will never be $500K. $700K is more their minimum. And in big banks, that's department head level. GS CIO was $3.4m many years ago.
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@IRJ said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
Scott was the CIO or a step or so below or to the side of that making that much or more on wallstreet. So sure, it's possible, but again, just super rare.
Was that at Citi?
No
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@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Dashrender said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@thecreaitvone91 said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@Obsolesce said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
@scottalanmiller said in Will Tech Giants actually adopt WFH?:
But admins head closer to $500K.
Where?
You can easily get in the $200-250k range but to get above that you pretty much got to go into the research science, supercomputer/computer science kind of stuff IMO.
Scott was the CIO or a step or so below or to the side of that making that much or more on wallstreet. So sure, it's possible, but again, just super rare.
CIO isn't a Systems Admin or Engineer. CIO is just a policy maker. Ours Makes way more than $500k as does any of our executive leadership.
If you ask Scott, he'll tell you that the CIO is the basically the ultimate IT Admin. I believe he also calls them IT Generalists.
A CIO is always a generalist, by definition. Therefore, since an system admin is the antithesis of a generalist, the two are fundamentally different jobs in every way. System Admin is a specialist. That's why to get to CIO you normally expect someone who has worked their way up as a specialist to have to specialize multiple times to have enough different experiences to be functional as a generalist. That's why there isn't a path from System Admin to CIO.
